Yonia Fain (1913–2013) was a writer and painter born in Kamenets-Podolsk. His family moved to Vilnius when Fain was ten years old, and he learned Yiddish and attended art school in the same city. As a young adult he moved to Warsaw but was forced to flee when the Nazi occupation of Poland began. From then on he entered a state of prolonged transience that brought him to Kobe, Japan. In 1941, Fain was transferred to the ghetto in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, where he made a living painting Japanese soldiers. In 1947, Fain left Shanghai and emigrated to Mexico City, where he sought out Diego Rivera, who advocated for his work and eventually curated his first painting retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Fain’s other notable project during this time was a mural commemorating victims of the Holocaust at the Panteón Israelita, a Jewish cemetery in Mexico City. Within a year of arriving in Mexico, Fain published his first poetry collection, A tlie unter di shtern (A Gallows Under the Stars). Poems in this volume reference his time in Shanghai and his experience fleeing across Nazi and Soviet territories with fake visas. ^{1 1} English translations exist of several poems in this collection, including the poignant and moving “A Poem About Shanghai Ghetto.” These were first translated by Irene Eber in her book Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime Shanghai (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and then by Sheva Zucker, for the 2018 film Yonia Fain: With Pen and Paintbrush, and Duosi Meng. See Duosi Meng, “Jewish Refugee Poetry in Shanghai,” (PhD diss., University of Illinois Chicago, 2023), 98, 109–110, 114–115, 121–123, 126–127, 134, 136–137, and 140–141, ProQuest (2830277925). While in Mexico City, Fain also taught a Yiddish literature teachers’ seminar at the university. Finally, in 1953, he moved one last time to New York City, where he taught painting first at the Brooklyn Museum and New York University and later at Hofstra University until his retirement in 1983. ^{2 2} For the most recent archivally sourced biography of Fain, see Meng, “Jewish Refugee Poetry in Shanghai,” 96–105. Sheva Zucker shared her insights on Fain’s biography in our communications as well. See also: Jennifer Stern, “An exciting, new way of thinking about refugee modernist artists like Yonia Fain,” Forward, October 2023, https://forward.com/yiddish-world/562941/refugee-jewish-artists-yonia-fain-modernism-holocaust-pogroms/.

Fain’s drawings and paintings have been exhibited only a few times over the past few decades. The 2018 film Yonia Fain: With Pen and Paintbrush by Josh Waletzky, which features an extensive interview in Yiddish between Fain and Yiddish translator and educator Sheva Zucker on his life as both a painter and a poet, stands out as one of very few significant and in-depth overviews of his life and work. The most recent retrospective of his art was in 2023, in the exhibit Modern-ish: Yonia Fain and the Art History of Yiddishland at the City University of New York Graduate Center. ^{3 3}  Nicholas Heskes, “Yonia Fain: Modern-ish: Yonia Fain and the Art History of Yiddishland,” The Brooklyn Rail, November 2023, https://brooklynrail.org/2023/11/artseen/Yonia-Fain-Modern-ish-Yonia-Fain-and-the-Art-History-of-Yiddishland/. 

Speaking in 1999 of his painting career in the United States, Fain declared: “As a painter, I am an outsider in American art.” ^{4 4} Yonia Fain, “Oral History Interview with Yonia Fain,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collections, part 3, filmed June 9, 1999, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn508235.  Fain’s six traumatic years in the Shanghai ghetto, an ad-hoc holding place for Jewish refugees under Japanese/Nazi allyship, had moved him to seek out meaning in creation as a defense against despair early in his artistic trajectory. ^{5 5} Fain, “Oral History,” part 2. While Fain found success as a mural painter in Mexico, his visual approach of pathos-laden history painting was at odds with the rigidity of the pop art and minimalist avant-garde movements that dominated the New York City art world at the time of his arrival. ^{6 6} Fain, “Oral History,” part 3. Fain described the difference between his approach and that of his more famous contemporaries: “[It was] after the terrible, terrible disappointment in Europe—concentration camps in Germany, gulags in Russia, death camps in Germany, the Lubyanka in Russia—that the artist turned to a more abstract, a more nonobjective kind of painting. And I found in the works of Jackson Pollock, or of de Kooning, who had some European background, or of Rothko, I found some very exciting accomplishments. But I felt that there are other experiences. There are more direct human experiences, which cannot be painted in the style of Mondrian, or cannot be painted in a very subconscious manner. There are some experiences which have a more direct, not a verbal . . . conversation with events, with recognizable forms, and with historical rhythms.” ^{7 7} Fain, “Oral History,” part 3.

As a writer, Fain was able to translate his history-driven vision with breadth and nuance into Yiddish. Though his poetry and prose would evolve, the subject matter of his early verses in A tlie unter di shtern and his time in Shanghai would shape the central concern of his entire oeuvre: representing the lives of refugees—those stateless and exiled like himself. ^{8 8} Meng, “Jewish Refugee History in Shanghai,” 105–149, provides a lovely analysis of Fain’s poems from the Shanghai period and that period’s influence on his later verse. Throughout his career he published short pieces in Yiddish periodicals like the Forverts and Di tsukunft, but it was not until after his retirement that he published additional book-length works: Gute orkhim (Beloved Strangers) (1983), Nyu-yorker adresn: Dertseylungen (New York Addresses: Stories) (1995), and Der finfter zman (The Fifth Season) (2008).

The story translated here, “Der lets” (The Clown), appeared in Nyu-yorker adresn: Dertseylungen, an illustrated compilation of short stories published in 1995 by the Welsh publisher Three Sisters Press in collaboration with the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies. The book’s publishing was made possible by funding from the family of South African Yiddish poet Mendel Tabatznik (1894–1975), and the book is dedicated in his memory. Nyu-yorker adresn tells nineteen discrete stories, all set in the same city. The stories follow immigrants in New York caught up in each other’s lives as they navigate personal failures, loss, and complex social networks composed primarily of other immigrants. Prominent examples of these themes appear in “A fotografye in an alter tsaytung” (A Photograph in an Old Newspaper), “Der hotel” (The Hotel), and “Der untererdisher tsimer” (The Underground Chamber). A number of other stories—including “The Clown,” “Di drite hant” (The Third Hand), “Yohanes Vermir” (Johannes Vermeer), ^{9 9} This story was translated into English by Sheva Zucker for the Forward in 2023 on the occasion of the exhibition at CUNY. “Dray dertseylungen” (Three Stories), and “Foter un zun” (Father and Son)—revolve around art, the art world, and the lives of artists.

“The Clown” is a story about a clown in an avant-garde theater troupe who decides to audition for the role of dictator in a new theater production after every other actor has been turned away by the troupe’s idealistic director. To the director’s surprise, the clown outperforms the dramatic actors by representing the archetype of the evil dictator more authentically than anyone could imagine. The appearance of a benign clown turned malevolent dictator in “The Clown” reflects a long-standing theatrical trope. Origins for the “evil clown” in Western theater can be traced to characters like the harlequin, a unique comic-servant role in commedia dell’arte theater of sixteenth-century Italy and France. ^{10 10} Laurence Senelick, “Harlequin,” in The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, ed. Martin Banham (Cambridge University Press, 1995) 472. Originally popularized by actor-director Zan Ganassa (Alberto Naselli) in the 1560s and ’70s with his troupe in Mantua, the harlequin would act as rogue comic relief, chasing women and undermining his master’s plans by following his own desires and aims. ^{11 11} N. D. Shergold, “Ganassa and the ‘Commedia dell’arte’ in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” The Modern Language Review 51, no. 3 (1956): 359–368, ProQuest (1293785853). His mischievousness fashioned the role of the clown into not just an entertainer, but a trickster and a devil. ^{12 12} Antonio Scuderi, “Arlecchino Revisited: Tracing the Demon from the Carnival to Kramer and Mr. Bean,” Theatre History Studies 20 (2000): 143–155, ProQuest (2158933).

In Fain’s lifetime, the slippage from fool to fascist would have resonated with Western classic films on the rise of Adolf Hitler. One such example is Charlie Chaplin’s first talkie film, The Great Dictator, released in 1940 at the height of the Third Reich’s power. Chaplin’s relentless satire of Adolf Hitler’s infamous mannerisms and oracular style as “Adenoid Hynkel” was a direct provocation that brought awareness to the serious dangers of Hitler’s ideas and influence for an American audience. The film concludes when Hynkel’s Jewish double (also played by Chaplin) replaces the fake Führer and declares the whole hateful enterprise of Hynkel’s regime over and done with. Yonia Fain’s dictator-clown is a decidedly less humorous and more sober treatment of this theme than Chaplin’s slapstick performance of an insolent, selfish man who ultimately gets what he deserves. Another theatrical switch with a similar inversion is Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), when a Jewish actor infiltrates a Nazi performance of Hamlet with Hitler in attendance. The actor successfully manages to switch places with Hitler in order to sabotage the government, leaving no one the wiser. “The Clown,” with its allegorical narrative, ironic tone, and rapid character transition, encourages the reader to ask related questions about the relationship between comedy, drama, and rhetorics of authoritarianism. Fain’s skill as a concise storyteller stands out in this sardonic and thought-provoking short story that resists closure. The reader is left to interpret the meaning of the clown’s transformation.

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